Some rush to assume (and assuming is always asinine!) that if the synoptic gospels ever say similar things in non-identical ways, they must contradict each other. If this was true, it would require that every single time two gospels say Jesus articulated something to separate people or in separate contexts, one of them or both must be wrong. But some logical facts are overlooked by such people—namely, that someone could reword the same thing and proclaim it multiple times, and that the synoptic gospels posit Jesus as a traveling preacher. As someone traveling from place to place, it would not be unusual for him to have promoted the same ideas and articulate them to more than one set of listeners.
Just to say it, as a rationalist, of course I do not assume that the gospels are consistent with each other, but each seeming or real contradiction would have to be assessed on its own. And Jesus being a traveling preacher would on its own necessitate that it is not automatically impossible for him to have given variations of the same sermons/statements to different recipients and in different areas. Even without specific examples of Christ's parallel statements in, say, Matthew and Luke, this still allows for exact or almost uniform repetition in his wording. After all, he could promote the same core concepts, just to varying groups of listeners as he ventures from one location to another.
What this would not clarify is any true disparities, if present, with how the synoptic gospels handle the exact same events. If Matthew said (and I am not referring to a particular example) that a healing happened only one time and before another precise event, and Luke said the same healing happened only one time and later than the separate event which Matthew says occurs afterward, then it would not matter that Jesus could have certainly repeated the similar or identical statements in different contexts. This sort of genuine contradiction in what each book puts forth would require that at most only the version in Matthew or only the version in Luke could be correct—again, I am not addressing any concrete example but a logically necessary fact about a hypothetical contradiction. The same would have to be true if two gospel accounts affirmed conflicting philosophical stances, such as ethical doctrines.
To summarize, two gospel books merely describing Jesus as making the same or similar statements in different times and places would not require that each text means Jesus is supposed to have only touched on a given issue a single time, with touching on that issue in any other context being supposedly contradictory and thus rendered untrue. Crucially, that this entails no intrinsic contradiction does not mean there must not be any legitimate contradictions in the synoptic gospels. Still, each individual instance of a disparity or what might seem like a disparity would have to be examined rationalistically to discover if the real nature of what is being said.
Someone claiming there is a contradiction between two gospel books does not make it so, and something could seem contradictory without truly contradicting logic or itself (the latter is still a matter of contradicting logic, just further removed from contradicting logical axioms). That the Biblical Jesus was a traveling preacher, though, would already account for many aspects of the syntopic gospels that do not state perfectly identical things about the precise words of Jesus and when and where he said them.
No comments:
Post a Comment